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Jacob A. Riis

News about Jacob A. Riis, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

1849 - 1914

A Danish-born police reporter with a knack of publicity and an abiding Christian faith, Jacob Riis won international recognition for his 1890 bestseller, How the Other Half Lives, which exposed the desperate and squalid conditions of New York Citys tenement slums and gave momentum to a sanitary reform movement that started in the 1840s and culminated in New York States landmark Tenement House Act of 1901.

Born in the rural town of Ribe in northern Denmark, Riis immigrated to New York in 1870 and spent five years as an itinerant worker. He turned to journalism in 1873 and was hired in 1877 as a police reporter at The New York Tribune, where he worked until 1890. He began taking photographs in 1888, after the invention of magnesium flash powder in Germany allowed photographic images to be captured in little light. He first began presenting his photographs as lantern slides as part illustrated lectures that were presented as entertainment. Although he viewed his photography as ancillary to his writing, today he is recognized as a important predecessor to social documentarians like Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange.

Following the critical success of How the Other Half Lives, Riis wrote a follow-up volume, Children of the Poor (1892), and a best-selling autobiography, The Making of an American (1901), among other books. His work was cited as an inspiration for future officials like Fiorello H. La Guardia and Frances Perkins.

As Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom argued in Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (New Press, 2008), the contradictory elements of Riiss life and work have largely been forgotten. He was an entertainer, a self-promoter, an evangelical, and a political conservative who had little faith in the power of government to correct social ills, arguing instead for Christian charity. He held views on race and ethnicity that would be considered offensive today but were consistent with the social Darwinist theories that were in vogue in the late 19th century.